s at Nohant, Balzac adopted
her habits. They talked from five in the evening all through the night
and till five o'clock in the morning; and he learnt to know her more
truly in these hours of familiar converse than in the four years of
her liaison with Jules Sandeau. He summed her up as a tomboy, an
artist, a mind great, generous, devoted and chaste (this last term
would need explanation); her characteristic traits were those of a
man, not a woman. She had, so he opined, neither force of conception,
nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty of reaching the true, nor
the art of the pathetic. The French language she used she did not
thoroughly know, but she had style. Of her glory she made little
account, and despised the public. Her fate was to be duped--and duped
she had been by Bocage, by de Lamennais, by Liszt, by Madame d'Agoult.
Together they discussed the future revolution in manners and morals,
and the influence their books might have in bringing it about. She
suggested to him some subjects that he might develop, and taught him
--up to then opposed to the weed--how to smoke latakia tobacco in a
hookah pipe. Imagining the hookah to be something Russian, he asked
Madame Hanska, to whom he related all this, to purchase him one,
telling her that he would have his wonderful stick-knob, with its
jewels, adapted to it, since he no longer bore the stick about with
him as a fetish.

From Frapesle he returned with the plan matured which he had been
preparing since his excursion to Italy. When at Genoa, in the previous
year, a merchant had talked to him of the existence of huge hills of
refuse metal left in the island of Sardinia by the Romans, who had
worked silver mines there. Aware how defective the Roman methods of
extraction were, Balzac thought there might be profit in treating this
slag by some process that would cause it to yield whatever precious
metal it contained; and he requested the merchant to procure him some
specimens of the slag, and to forward them to Paris for examination,
promising, if the tests were satisfactory, to include the Genoese in
the company which he was sure of being able to float for the
exploitation of the concern. Although the merchant did not forward the
specimens, Balzac consulted some specialists in Paris, Monsieur
Carraud amongst others, who all concurred in pronouncing the
enterprise feasible. Finally, the novelist decided to proceed to the
spot and investigate the matter personally.